FALL RIVER: The Nova Scotia NDP are ready to go to battle for Nova Scotians.
That’s the messaging Leader Claudia Chender brought to the caucus retreat the party had for MLA’s and officials at Inn on the Lake in Fall River last week she told The Laker News during an interview during a break.
“While we’re about to go into a budget session in the legislature so we like to take the time to kind of regroup and focus our strategy,” she said. “We’re certainly on the road to an election in 2025.
“We feel that it’s really important all of our MLAs are focused and know all the issues and are ready to go into the legislature and go into their communities and fight for Nova Scotians.”
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She was asked about opposition party’s always criticizing the government in power, no matter who it is, but without much of anything concrete of their own to fix issues facing the province. Moreso how can those other party’s give residents confidence they can fix the problems the province is facing.
“I think that we have been a very positive in our messaging and conversation with Nova Scotians,” she said. “Absolutely, our job is to hold the government to account, but we do that by demonstrating over and over again to Nova Scotians that they can expect better.
“I think on health care, this is a government that promised to fix health care and the people that we speak to don’t have doctors; have emergency rooms in their communities that are closed more than they’re open.
“Even if they do live closer to a regional hospital, they know that they might have a wait that is hours and hours and hours and hours long that in some cases dissuades them from trying to get the care they need.
“That is unacceptable. We shouldn’t be living in that kind of situation.”
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Chender said there needs to be focus by the government on the solutions they’re announcing.
“We have a government that has an announcement every day about health care, but more Nova Scotians than ever who don’t have a doctor, who can’t access emergency care so there’s something wrong there.
“What do we do? We focus where the focus is needed, ensuring that people have access to a collaborative care clinic, that they are attached to primary care, and that they can seek and get emergency care when they need it.”
On the cost of living “I think we see this government with tiny little buckets of programs. They say that it’s targeted relief. They say that they’re doing what they can, but the reality is that they need to do more. There are so many Nova Scotians who are struggling right now, and this government is in a position to help.
“What they’ve done is take a program like the Heating Assistance Rebate program, and they’ve actually cut back both the amount of that program, which is designed to help people afford to get through the winter in this very cold climate, on this very cold day. They’ve also reduced the eligibility.”
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Asked what the NDP’s priorities may be this time as legislature returns, Chender feels they will keep harping on similar issues they have during the past few years.
“Affordability, housing, and health care,” she said. “There’s lots of other issues that are important to Nova Scotians, but those are the three that I think are impacting people’s lives the most and that we hear about the most.”
Chender spoke a bit more on the homelessness issue in N.S. and the provinces announcement on bringing Pallet shelters to help, including at Beacon House in Lower Sackville where 19 are reported to be going.
“At a broad level, it’s really actually clear what is required, and what’s required is housing,” said Chender. “We need housing at a scale that we’ve never seen before, and a big portion of that housing has to be genuinely affordable rent geared to income.
“Pallet shelters those are immediate and in often cases lifesaving interventions that need to be made. But they are not solutions. The solution is housing.”
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Chender said an NDP government would prioritize the creation of a massive amount of housing.
“That can happen in lots of different ways. That can happen through incentivizing private development,” said Chender. “That’s what we see most. We see that here, but we also know that not only is that not accessible to many people, but in communities like Fall River it can also make the existing housing less accessible to people who already live here and squeeze people out.
She said the other thing the NDP would do is build and incentivize the building of non-market housing.
“In Nova Scotia, we have non-profit housing providers, we have co-ops, we have lots of organizations who already, build, own, operate, rent geared to income housing,” she said. “We need to massively expand that, and we don’t see that.
“When the government talks about housing, they count things like shelter beds in the housing they’ve created, and we think that is absolutely wrong.
“We need to continue to ensure there are warm, safe places for people to be, but ultimately people need housing,” said Chender. “We have not seen that prioritized in the way that Nova Scotians tell us they need it to be.”
